


Depressurize

by airdeari



Series: self-indulgent aoilight within [10]
Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Depression, M/M, dissociating at the mere mention of codependent feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-09 22:32:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12898224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: Light has suffered from these episodes for as long as he can reliably remember. It's different now that Aoi's around.





	Depressurize

**Author's Note:**

> im way too depressed right now to think of a better title for this. should i wait until i have feelings and motivations again so i can edit this before i post it? absolutely. do i have enough willpower to care? buddy i ate two hot dog buns dogless for dinner. i don't have enough will or power for anything. i'm gonna sleep for eleven hours.

Unless it came down to business and he needed to contact his sister, Aoi did not consider himself connected to the morphogenetic field. On a subconscious level, he believed Hongou’s flawed research about how danger and epiphany strengthened morphic resonance. On ordinary days, he thought himself an ordinary man.

But when he came back to the Fields’ apartment one ordinary evening, he felt a stink in the air without using his nose. Curled in a nest of blankets on the couch with her eyes glued to a quiet TV playing commercials, Clover was perhaps poisoned by the stench, but she was not where it was thickest.

Opening the door to Light’s bedroom was like realizing that the scent, suddenly magnitudes stronger, was that of rotting flesh, a split second before laying eyes on the days-old corpse.

“Oh, Jesus, Light.”

If his sister was in a nest, Light was in a cavern. The corner of the mattress was exposed from where he had yanked out the sheets to shroud them over himself, along with the duvet, and both of the blankets that he used in the winter when Aoi was not around to share his body heat. The pillows were scattered around him, almost positioned for comfort, but not quite; they acted more as supports in the walls of his fortress.

“Hey, Light, you okay?” Aoi asked, his voice raised. Light had looked in his direction when he opened the door, but he had his noise-cancelling headphones on.

Now, with one hand and one bony shoulder, he was pressing them closer to his ears.

“What’re you listening…?” Aoi started to ask, before letting his voice trail off. His eyes followed the wire from the left ear down.

The jack sat exposed at Light’s crossed feet. He was listening to nothing.

“Okay. Okay. Wow, uh, Light?”

Light just gave a soft grunt.

“Hey, you doing okay?” Taking a seat at the edge of the bed, Aoi pressed his hand down on the mattress in front of Light’s folded legs to signal his position. “What’s going on?”

Light shrugged.

“You’re… you’re here, right? You’re not, like, dissociating to hell?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes.

Aoi curled his fingers into the sheets. “Hey, say something?” he whispered. “Say something if you’re not dissociating. Light?”

“Not to hell,” Light muttered.

“You—you okay, though? You need help? Gimme your hand, I can—”

“I’m fine, Aoi.” He folded his arm closer to his chest, tightening the blankets in his hold. “I’m just… tired.”

“Tired,” Aoi repeated with a skeptical grimace.

A muffled ping came from somewhere close, perhaps under the bed. Aoi recognized it as the low battery notification for Light’s cellphone. Light barely stirred at the noise, and even then it was only after a delay.

“Light,” Aoi said, “you’re depressed.”

Again, his reaction came a beat late, and it was only a tiny shrug.

“How long ago did you get off the meds for this?” Aoi asked, hopping off the bed into a crouch to search for Light’s phone. “S’been a couple months now, right? How long you been feelin’ like this?”

The floor at Light’s side of the bed was littered with books unfinished, ribbons sticking out of the sides within the first fifty pages of most, one book lying open with braille inscrutable in the darkness. Aoi folded the book jacket over the open page and closed it, pulling everything into a stack before he realized what his hands were doing. He caught the sheen of glass on Light’s phone and snatched it up, reaching with his other hand for the charger.

“I got your phone, you wanna call your doctor?” he asked, watching the screen light up as the battery detected a charge. “It’s about 4:30. Thursday. They’ll still be in if—hey, I’ll call for you if you want, okay? I know it’s—”

“Aoi, _stop_.”

Light had his head tucked against his knees, pressing the headphones close to his ears again as he huddled under the shroud of his blankets and pillows.

“Light, I… I just wanna help,” Aoi said softly.

“I don’t…” Light let his head sink further. “Want… help.”

“Babe, that’s what depression does to you.” Aoi rolled his eyes and stretched up to his feet. “It’s no big deal, alright? It’s an easy two minutes for me and it’s, like, the end of the world for you, or whatever. I got it. You got the number in your phone, or—”

“Aoi, please, please stop.” He was wound as tight as his body would go, as if hoping to wall himself off from reality. “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

Something about his desperate posture, his weak voice, made it all click in Aoi’s head. “Is this… sensory overload, kinda?” he asked in a quiet, slow voice.

Light took a while to evaluate the answer for himself before bobbing his head in a shallow nod. It was close enough.

“Overwhelming, maybe? Too much right now.”

Light gave a slightly deeper nod to the word _overwhelming_.

“Yeah. Okay. That’s… yeah.” Aoi sat himself at the very edge of the bed, watching the mattress to make sure the shift in weight would not upset Light’s position. “That’s fair. I just… you know. Just love you, okay. Worried about you. Just wanna make sure you’re… You need somethin’ to eat? Drink? When’s the last time you—”

“Aoi,” Light said sharply.

“God. Fuck.” Aoi rose from the bed with a huff, pulling at his face. “This is _me_ , now, this ain’t you. I’m bein’ fuckin’ neurotic.” More to himself, he said, “You’re fine, you said you’re fine, ain’t nothin’ I can do. You’re fine.”

Light had set about repositioning his pillows and blankets around himself to make a tighter huddle. His face was blank.

“M’gonna go check on Clover. Leave you alone,” Aoi muttered. “Make sure she ain’t spongin’ up the depression shit through the field and whatever.”

Light fell still with a small, soft sigh. His face was not capable of much change in expression, but it leaned towards forlorn at the sound of his sister’s name.

“Hey.” Aoi stepped back towards the bed, laying a hand near Light. “Listen. You give me a nod, and I’m gonna just kiss you on the cheek. And you don’t have to kiss me back, or even smile if you ain’t up for it right now, I just wanna kiss you if you want it. I love you.”

Light’s eyelashes twitched with the movement of his eyes under his lids.

“Just give me a nod if it’s okay. You don’t have to.”

He gave two small nods.

Aoi brushed a finger along Light’s cheek as he leaned closer. He made his kiss so very, very slow. When he opened his eyes, Light was not smiling, and it hurt his heart more than he thought it would when he had given Light that permission.

“Be out there if y’need anything,” he mumbled.

He began to lean back from the bed when he heard a soft vocalization from Light’s closed throat, and the sound of blankets shifting. Light slowly raised his arm, careful to not disturb his little fort, as he lifted his head in search of Aoi.

“Don’t look at me like that or I’ll kiss you again,” Aoi warned with a weak smile.

Light gave a small, quick nod. His fingers twitched, beckoning Aoi towards him.

“ _Light._ ” Aoi leaned a knee onto the mattress, gently combed Light’s hair back from his face, and planted another kiss on his forehead. “God, you’re so cute. Kiss you again?”

He was still not smiling, but he gave another tiny nod. Aoi kissed up into his right temple, then his left, and when he did not protest to either of those, he kissed slowly down Light’s cheek, keeping his hands feather-light against Light’s shoulders. He could not help but kiss the corner of Light’s mouth when he saw it begin to rise in a smile, but when he felt Light give a little twitch, he quickly finished with one last chaste kiss on the nose. As he lifted his head up, he felt a warm hand on the back of his neck, pulling him back down.

It was a soft kiss, and it did not last long, but it felt like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. They were both smiling when Light pulled away and cast his demure face down.

“Kissed the depression right outta you, huh,” Aoi teased. He caught himself in the middle of sliding his hands down Light’s shoulders to ask, “Hugs okay?”

Light answered only by shifting his weight towards Aoi’s chest, tucking his head down to fit against the collarbone. “You did,” he whispered.

Lacking a direct answer, Aoi wrapped his tentative arms only loosely around Light’s mass of blankets and pillows. “Did what?” he asked.

“You’re why I was able to stop taking antidepressants in the first place,” Light murmured.

For the first beat, Aoi could not comprehend what Light had said. For the second, he finally understood the words, but still rejected the meaning. “Pretty sure that ain’t how it works, babe.”

Light shook his head. “I’m not _cured_ ,” he said. “Clearly, I’m… but being with you is… I can manage, now. I don’t need… I have you.”

Aoi’s throat had gone dry by the time he found his words, which were a shaky, “That’s a lot.”

Light bristled. “I didn’t mean… I’m sorry,” he said, muffling his words with Aoi’s shirt. “I’m not… expressing myself correctly. I don’t…”

“Should make dinner,” Aoi mumbled absently, sliding off of the bed. “You and Clover. Should check on her, too.”

The weight of responsibility had this effect on him that squeezed his personality out and replaced it only with function. He was numb as he slipped out the bedroom door. He remembered asking Clover how she was feeling, but of the resultant conversation, all he remembered was what she wanted for dinner, which he found himself preparing on the stovetop within the next minute. He did not like macaroni and cheese much himself; dairy disagreed too much with his stomach to appreciate it, but Clover had requested it and Light was a glutton for junk food, probably even more in his current state.

“I couldn’t really take care of him like you can.”

Although Aoi had barely noticed when Clover walked into the kitchen, he knew she was there. He did not jump at the sound of her voice, but something changed when she said those words, something that made him look at the hand holding the wooden spoon stirring the béchamel and realize it was his, and that this was now.

“Like, he’d say he’s got a support system ’cuz of me, but… what did I ever do, y’know?” she went on, and maybe this was the middle of a conversation of which he did not remember the start. “I never really know how to help him when it gets really bad. I thought there wasn’t anything I _could_ do. He said so, too. But I feel like you… you get him, kinda. I think that’s what it is. He _lets_ you get him. He tries to hide stuff from me, but he lets you get him.”

“Why’s he hide stuff from you?”

She stuffed her hands into the pocket of her hoodie, an oversized one probably stolen from her brother’s closet. “Do you ever hide when you’re feeling bad from _your_ sister?”

The béchamel rolled around in the saucepan, splashing against the wooden spoon that Aoi had stopped spinning.

“He thinks I can’t handle this stuff. Or _thought_ , maybe,” she said with a shrug. “I mean, with you around, now, he’s… he talks about it more when he’s having a hard time, instead of just trying to bottle it up for my sake or whatever. I think you kinda taught him it’s okay to do that.”

“Didn’t learn it from me,” Aoi muttered, tapping the spoon against the side of the pot to get the creamy drips off.

“Yeah, you’re still an emotional pressure cooker or whatever.” Clover folded her arms with a sneer. “But you got Light to stop being one, so.”

“So what?”

“So thanks.” She wiggled her fingers through a tangle in her long hair as she shrugged and turned out of the kitchen. “You’re a good boyfriend.”

That one left Aoi staring into space for so long he was worried he had burned the béchamel when he eased back into reality and realized he had left the heat on.

Water was bubbling up around half-cooked noodles when a tall shadow lumbered into the kitchen, an arm out in front of him to guide his way. “Careful with your fingers, babe,” Aoi called to him before he could take too many steps closer. “Lotta hot burners. Done in… seven minutes.”

Light pulled his hand back to his stomach, moving faster now that he had pinpointed Aoi’s location by sound. With a lazy look close to a smile, he sidled up to the cook, settled his chin into his shoulder, and slid an arm around his stomach.

“I’m gonna have to turn around to drain the pasta eventually,” Aoi warned.

“Seven minutes?” said Light.

Aoi glanced at the clock. “More like six.”

“Until then.”

He smirked. After a quick stir of the noodles, he gave Light’s hair a kiss, interlacing their fingers against his waist.

With about three minutes to go until the pasta was finished, Light finally spoke again. “What I was saying earlier,” he began. “I didn’t mean to imply that…”

“Nah, I get it. Clover explained it, kinda.”

Light gave a little jolt of surprise, lifting his head to point it out of the kitchen. “I never told her anything about…”

“Yeah, well, that’s the whole point.” Aoi shrugged. “You’re less cagey about your stuff now. S’good.”

Light sank his weight even deeper into Aoi when he relaxed into the embrace again. “I’m happy we found each other again, after all these years,” he sighed. “You’re a true friend, Aoi. You always have been. Thank you for coming back.”

“Where the hell do you get off thanking _me_?” Aoi grumbled, poking at the pasta again. “You’re the one who somehow got past all _my_ bullshit and still… liked me, or whatever.”

“Because you’re a true friend.” Light leaned his cheek against Aoi’s neck. “If ever there’s anything I can do for you… please.”

“You do shit for me all the time. I’m always fuckin’ myself up and you’re… right there.”

Light squeezed his hand. “I could do more.”

Aoi let the wooden spoon slip from his fingers and float in the pot, shifting with the rising bubbles. “I could tell you more,” he said.

“Yes,” Light insisted. “Please.”

Aoi shrugged Light up from his shoulder to fold himself against his warm chest, slowly sliding his hands up his back and falling into a squeeze. He kept an eye on the boiling pot, watching the elbows rise up above each other and swim around in a chaotic pool that reminded him a little too much of what was going through his own head: a thousand thoughts, worries, secrets rising up to the surface, only to hesitate and sink back down again.

“Not right now,” he said. “I’m takin’ care of you now. Gonna focus on takin’ care of you.”

“Aoi,” Light protested, sifting his fingers through Aoi’s hair.

“I’ll try, okay,” he said. “I know I’m like this. I know I’m… I’ll try. I’m okay right now, anyway, I swear.”

He felt a kiss on the crown of his head and smiled.

“Think it’s time to drain the pasta,” he said.

“I smell cheese,” Light said as he let Aoi go. “What are _you_ having for dinner, dear?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“You see, Aoi, this is what worries me,” Light sighed.

Aoi set the pot back down on the burner to let out a sigh of his own. “Can’t I be a fuckup at takin’ care of myself, and you’re a fuckup takin’ care of yourself, but we take care of each other real good?”

“But I can’t _cook_ , Aoi.”

Aoi smirked at Light’s pout as he poured the pot into the strainer in the sink. “That right there?” he said. “That’s good enough. Just kinda frown at me until I make myself somethin’. That’ll do.”

The creases in Light’s forehead and near his lips deepened with intensity.

“Damn. That’s real good.” Aoi kissed the wrinkled corner of Light’s mouth. “Gonna make myself a fuckin’ lamb chop if you keep this up.”

Light tried very hard to maintain his frown despite a desperate urge to smile.


End file.
